LORETTA SMITH is a Melbourne-based writer, public speaker and life coach. Her bestselling biography A Spanner in the Works: The extraordinary story of Alice Anderson and Australia’s first ‘all-girl’ garage (Hachette, 2019) has been optioned for a TV series and inspired the play Garage Girls, performed to a sell-out audience La Mama Theatre in 2023. The play will be touring regionally throughout Victoria in 2024 as part of the VCE playlist. Corpus in Extremis: a Memoir, is her second book.

‘

Unexpected and beautifully written…I LOVED this story’
Miriam Margolyes

‘Fascinating’ Kerry Greenwood

‘Smith is an elegant writer and her love for her protagonist is infectious’ Katherine Wilson, The Age

‘It is a strength of this book that Smith weaves Anderson’s story so adeptly into this wider tapestry of sexual politics, cultural mores, and the development of feminism in 1920s Australia…’
Sharon Verghis,  Australian Book Review

This memoir is one of strength, endurance, resilience and a down right stubbornness to survive. Despite her challenges Loretta tells of the love and laughter that filled her life and her amazing achievements.
As a nurse and the Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care, I can see lessons to be learned from Loretta’s journey. But overall, I can see a life well lived by a remarkable person.
Hon Ged Kearney MP

An extraordinary story of survival and resilience against considerable challenges centred around Smith’s brittle bones. Despite all, she tells her memoir with vigour and good humour taking the ‘dis’ out of disability and wiping the floor with it’
Sara Hardy, author of The Unusual Life of Edna Walling and A Secretive Life
 
‘This exquisitely written tells compelling tales about broken bones and heartbreak, as well as about one extraordinary woman’s strong-willed and creative mind and quiet courage. While Smith navigates difficulties unimaginable to most of us in her everyday, she’s woven out of their painful threads such a vital story of a passionately lived life that I found difficult to part with the book when if came to an end’
Lee Kofman, author of The Writer Laid Bare and Imperfect